Bent Sørensen (18/07/1958), a Danish composer, born in Borup. He received his musical education by, amongst others, Per Nørgård and Ib Nørholm. Bent Sørensen’s music contains something of the earlier times, still sounding in the present: Church bells, birds, wind-swept church yards, angels. Death. Bent Sørensen’s music is always about something, even though one cannot say exactly what. There are ardent lovers, sad processions on the way to the cemetery, mute women with upturned eyes of female saints, sallow nun’s habits, angel pictures, blurred images, outlines of the richness in detail of a time past, dark mould in the early spring. The aesthetics of decline. Music on the edge of silence.

The 500 years that separate Renaissance master Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1410-97) and Danish composer Bent Sørensen (b. 1958) seem to disappear in this extraordinary Requiem which is a totality integrated both dramatically and musically; a work that unites the stylistic contrasts in a mode of expression that seems at once timeless and entirely present. The project has been initiated by conductor Paul Hillier and interpreted by his GRAMMY-winning ensemble Ars Nova Copenhagen.